Research project: Order to chaos and back again

Most people understand the growth of small disturbances leading to chaos, but the formation of many structures relies on establishing subsequent order out of that chaos.

Project Overview

Faraday waves on a bubble wall

A collaboration between Professor Leighton (University of Southampton) and Professor Maksimov (Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) explains the eventual choice of the final shapes of stars, viruses, giant gas planets, tumours, and weather patterns in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. They show disturbances in shape grow chaotically under the influence of external forces, but then eventually setttle down to a stable form. The predictions are tested against experimental observations of the shapes of air bubbles in water disturbed by sound fields.

Related videos

Click here for videos of Faraday waves on bubble walls.Click here for videos of showing increasing numbers of modes being excited on a bubble wall as the amplitude increases, leading eventually to bubble fragmentation (warning: large file).Click here to see electrochemical signals generate by Faraday waves on the walls of rising bubbles.

The image at the top of this page is a frame from the movie listed under 'useful downloads'. It shows a stable form with icosohedral symmetry is chosen by a bubble, after small disturbances on an initially spherical bubble grow chaotically in a sound field, and then settle down to a regular structure. Below it is the modelled form: the two agree. See the 2012 paper listed below for details.

Faraday waves modelled on a bubble

Curious fact

Strangely enough, the stable set of waves that eventually occur on the bubble wall are Faraday waves, named after the great Michael Faraday (1791-1867) who first got thinking about them when he saw ripples on the surface of beer in barrels loaded onto a cart moving over cobbled streets! He recreated them by placing a tray of water on an 18 ft long plank of water than then vibrating the plank with a violin bow. Click hereto see the movie of Professor Leighton recreating this experiment.

Recreating Faraday's

Want to know more?

Two clicks (the first one here, then click the request button) will get you a copy of the paper:

Leighton, T.G. (2004) From seas to surgeries, from babbling brooks to baby scans: The acoustics of gas bubbles in liquids, Invited Review Article for International Journal of Modern Physics B, 18(25), 3267-314